Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] Dialectics & Liberation: Insights from Buddhism and Marxism

Episode Date: April 14, 2025

ORIGINALLY RELEASED Feb 16, 2023 Breht gives a moving speech on the topic of dialectial materialism, Buddhism, and Marxism. After explaining the philosophy of dialectical materialism in depth, he uses it to unite core insights from Buddhism and Marxism, arguing that their combination offers a potent path toward inward and outward liberation. He ends by advancing the archetype of the Bodhisattva Revolutionary, asserting it as a uniquely well-rounded and profoundly deep path for revolutionaries interested in radical transformation.  Huge shout out to the ASU Zen Devils and MECHA for inviting Breht out to Arizona to give this speech, meet listeners, and visit the Sonoran Desert for the first time!   Learn more about MECHA here: https://linktr.ee/MECHAdeASU ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio HERE Outro Beat Prod. by flip da hood

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev. Left Radio. So on today's episode, I'm going to be reading a speech that I wrote for an event that I was invited to at Arizona State University. A Marxist-Leninist organization called Metsha got together with a Zen Buddhist club on campus called the Zen Devils. And they came together and they were thinking who could be a good speech. that would come and sort of bridge the gap between our two organizations, one Marxist and one Buddhist, and someone thought of me, Brett from Rev Left. And so, luckily, they are on the same campus as Professor Alexander Avina, who's a friend of mine and multiple guests on Rev. Left and on guerrilla history at this point as well.

They reached out to him, got my email through him, invited me out, and through their university, He compensated me quite nicely for the speaker's fee. And I went out there this past week, and I performed this speech. I did a two-hour podcast beforehand with Chewy from Mecha, which I'll release as soon as he sort of edit it, finishes it up, sends it over to me. I'll put it out on our platform as well. He hosts a podcast called Heat Wave, which I highly recommend people go check out. And again, shortly it'll be on the Rev Left feed. When we post that podcast episode, I'll also make sure to link to two.

heat wave and their organization so people can check it out. But it was a it was a wonderful wonderful trip and I did this speech and it was very well received and overall incredibly enjoyable. And I wanted to be able to share this speech with more people. And importantly, if you are at a university, if you are a part of a club or an organization on campus, if you think I might be an interesting speaker to come out and talk to your organization, feel free to invite me. It is kind of hard to get a hold of me. I've tried very hard, especially early on,

to keep up with all messages, all DMs, everything that fell apart as soon as our platform reached a certain size, so I can't always be responding to emails and everything. But if you send an email, if you actually work it out with your university, and you have an opening to invite me to your campus to speak on any topic that you think is relevant or that I would have something interesting to say on,

You can reach out to The Revolutionary Left at gmail.com. Just please make sure you put in your header university invitation for speaker or speaker at university or inviting Brett to come to our university to speak, some combination of those words so that my audio engineer guy, when he's scamming through the hundreds of emails we have, can sort of pick those out and see what the opportunity is. It's not only a wonderful opportunity for me to travel and see a new city and visit a new camera. campus, but for me to meet listeners, something that I don't often get to do, to be able to go out and actually engage with and meet and talk to people who find the show valuable or that, you know, like the show or whatever, it's a wonderful opportunity and it feels great and it's awesome. And I appreciate it and I would love to do it again if the opportunity ever arises. So huge shout out to the Zen Devils, huge, huge shout out to Mecha de ASU

and to Chui in particular, who was the sort of point person that got me through it. Huge shout out to the Heat Wave podcast. We'll be releasing my collab with them very shortly. And today you are just going to hear the speech I gave at ASU this past weekend on dialectical materialism, transformation, and liberation. And importantly, what Buddhism and Marxism can say about both and possibly even learn from each other. So let's get into it. Hello, everybody, and thank you all so much for coming out today.

My name is Brett O'Shea, and it is a genuine pleasure and a sincere honor to have been invited to ASU to speak on two world historic traditions that have not only long fascinated me, but have been foundational in shaping who I am and how I see the world. These traditions, which we will be talking about today, are, of course, the centuries-long social, political, and economic tradition of Marxism, and the millennia-long psychological. spiritual, and even existential tradition of Buddhism. Now, on their face, these two traditions seem to be worlds apart, fundamentally concerned with two totally different terrains of human knowledge and experience, and at times, historically, they have even been at ostensibly direct odds with one another, whether in the tensions between Chinese communists and Tibetan Buddhists, or Japanese Zen practitioners turned kamikaze fighters allied with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union in World War II.

But I believe that once we start digging deeper, below the top soil of recent history, and beneath the sediments of cultural distinctions and separate academic fields of study, we can find philosophical overlap and profound synergy between these two traditions. Now let me tell you what I aim to accomplish in this speech. In part one, I intend on briefly outlining the basic ideas and aims

of Buddhism and Marxism so as to give you a basic grasp on these two traditions and their orientations. In part two, I want to explore some of the ways in which the seemingly different philosophical outlooks of Marxism and Buddhism overlap and dovetail with one another in surprising and quite profound ways. I will focus primarily on the philosophical framework of dialectical materialism and the ways in which the Buddhist concept of the three poisons can help illuminate the problems within capitalist institutions. In part three, after highlighting the ways in which they are similar, I will touch on some of the ways in which they differ in an attempt to lay out what Buddhism can offer Marxism, as well as what Marxism might offer Buddhism. Finally, in the concluding

chapter, I'll put forward the archetype of what I call the Bodhisattva revolutionary, an attempt to show how, through embodying this archetype, we can work toward real liberation via inner and outer transformation. And with that said, let's move into part one, the basics of Buddhism and Marxism. Part one. The aim of Buddhism and Marxism is liberation. I think liberation is a great starting concept for exploring these traditions, because both are aimed in very different ways, perhaps, at a form of liberation. Let's start with Marxism. Marxism is, of course, a tradition stretching back to the work of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, who lived in Europe during the Industrial Revolution, and who developed, one, a world historical and hitherto unmatched apprehension and

critique of the capitalist mode of production, two, a new theory of history and how human societies evolve over time, and three, an economic and political program aimed at the liberation of humanity from the division of societies into class hierarchies, and the exploitation, injustice, inequality and brutality that class society necessitates. Together, they developed historical materialism, a scientific analysis of history and society and their development over time, which asserts that the institutions and dominant ideologies of a society are an outgrowth of its economic activity,

and its economic activity, the way in which humans produce and reproduce the necessities of life, is the primary locus of social organization, influencing or outright determining the other structures in society. They traced human development from ancient and tribal forms of what they called primitive communism, up through early slave societies, through feudalism, and to capitalism, illustrating how the way in which these societies produce the necessities of life and divided themselves into castes or classes created contradictions that spawned a conflict between classes

and eventually created the conditions for that mode of production's transcending. and the arrival of a new, more advanced mode of production and set of social relations that itself generated new contradictions that, in turn, created the conditions for its replacement. In addition to this historical materialism, Marx and Engels began to develop what is now the Marxist philosophical framework, dialectical materialism. Dialectical materialism provides the structure for thinking through historical materialism for generating social analyses and for strategizing movements and organizations dedicated to the transcendence of the current mode of production, namely capitalism. In simple terms, historical

materialism is the scientific aspect of Marxism, and dialectical materialism is the philosophical framework of Marxism. Socialism, according to Marxism, is what we would call the transitionary period between capitalism and Marxism's ultimate goal of communism, a stateless, and Marxism's ultimate goal of communism, a stateless, classless, moneyless society where human beings are no longer stratified into castes or class hierarchies. In the same way that the transition from feudalism to capitalism is often referred to as mercantilism, with features of both the old feudalism as well as the emerging capitalism, socialism is the transition from capitalism to communism, with features of both the old capitalism and the new communism.

In summary, Marxism is a scientific approach to history and human social development, a philosophical framework, and a socio-political economic movement aimed at the construction of socialism out of the contradictions present within capitalism, all toward the ultimate goal of a human civilization no longer divided into classes at all. Marxism seeks to liberate humanity from the exploitation, the inequality, the utter irrationality, and the brutal injustices of capitalism. Buddhism, on the other hand, seeks a totally different type of liberation, that of nirvana, or liberation from the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, known as samsara. Buddhism is a tradition going back 2,500 years to the life and teachings of an erstwhile, Hindu prince turned spiritual seeker and ascetic, who, once introduced to the sufferings of the world, sickness, old age, and death, after years of being sheltered from the vicissitudes of life in his palace, left his family and life of luxury in search of deeper truths about the nature of reality, suffering, and the human mind. After years of wandering and fasting and meditating

and engaging in all sorts of spiritual practices and finally fed up with all of them, the story goes that he sat underneath a Bodhi tree and refused to get up until he finally knew the mind's true nature. Day in and day out he sat under the tree and went to war with his own mind, overcoming all forms of struggle, of suffering, of temptation one by one, until finally he reached what we now call enlightenment and became the awakened one, or the Buddha. After his awakening, he spent the next 40 years before his death, walking around the Indian suffering. subcontinent offering his teachings to anyone who is interested. He built a huge following and upon his death generated a new world religion, spiritual path, and philosophy. This religion philosophy,

known as Buddhism, would migrate out of India and throughout the rest of Asia, morphing and evolving and mixing with the cultures of different societies, eventually producing the beautiful traditions in various schools of Buddhism. The core of Buddhism, however, revolves around the four noble truths. Life is suffering. We suffer because we crave or desire. There is a way out of suffering, and the eightfold path is the way out. The eightfold path is a set of eight practices, both ethical and meditative, that, when done correctly and consistently, lead one to enlightenment. In addition to this, Buddhism highlights the three marks of existence. In permanence, in Polly pronounced Anika, suffering or unsatisfactoriness,

in Polly known as Duca and No Self or Anata, and argues that we humans are subject to delusion regarding these three intrinsic qualities of our existence, that we try to protect ourselves from them in a myriad of ways and thus escape them, but these attempts just create more suffering. Through meditation practice specifically and following the eightfold path generally, we can come to see the ubiquitous presence of these three marks of existence with increasing clarity and liberate ourselves from the immense suffering we create for ourselves by denying or running away from them. In short, Buddhism seeks to liberate human beings from the unnecessary suffering

that stems inevitably and inexorably from our constant desiring, our ego delusions, and our desperate clinging and attachment to things that, by their very nature, change and dissolve away. We are always talking to ourselves in our heads. We are always grabbing at pleasure and trying to push pain away. We have this nagging sense of always being not quite satisfied, never quite complete. And so we spend our entire lives leaning forward into the future or backwards into the past, searching for something external to us that will finally make us happy and feel fulfilled

and trying to protect ourselves from all the pain and tragedy and despair in our lives by building up our psychological defense mechanisms and reifying our sense of separateness. We are always extracting ourselves from the present moment, what is right here and right now in anticipation for what's coming or in nostalgia for what we once had. We are a mess, and the world is a mess because we are a mess. Buddhism seeks to liberate us from our delusions, our self-inflicted suffering, our desperate clinging and craving,

and the faulty idea that we are located somewhere behind the eyes and between the ears, looking out at a world that is not us and acting as a trembling little commentator to our own lives. To be liberated from all of this is to feel ourselves be completely at home in the world, to be the very cosmos we think is outside of us, to neither cling to pleasures nor run from pain, but to live our lives in the present moment, in deep equanimity and to accept life and death as they come on their terms with love and compassion and joy in our hearts. So now we see what at a basic level these two traditions are all about

and we can see how each one is concerned with a certain type of liberation from certain forms of suffering. And that sets us up quite well for part two, the interesting ways in which these seemingly very different traditions overlap. Part 2. Dialectics and Transformation. It is my contention, which I will defend throughout the rest of this section, that the philosophical framework of dialectical materialism found and developed within the Marxist tradition and summarized above, has profound overlap with core Buddhist concepts and with a Buddhist worldview overall. After exploring dialectics, I will turn to the context. I will turn to

to an investigation of the three poisons found within Buddhism and attempt to show how these poisons of the individual mind manifest themselves in capitalist institutions and social structures, which in turn create and exacerbate massive suffering for all sentient beings like ourselves. To begin, let me remind you what dialectical materialism is, as it can be a difficult concept for people to wrap their minds around, especially those who are new to the idea. The first thing to say here first, though, briefly, is that Marxism is not a dead doctrine. It is not a dogma, and its core concepts are always being revisited and revised generation after generation. In this respect, it is scientific, meaning it is open-ended, non-dogmatic, experimental, open to new evidence,

and in a constant state of evolution itself, advanced by real movements, revolutions as experiments, and the empirical data that they generate. Marxism is not what Marx thought. Marxism is an ever-evolving tradition that Marx and angles inaugurated through their work, but which is then developed by successive generations of Marxist thinkers and revolutionaries. Marxist concepts, like dialectical materialism,

are also subject to debates, differing interpretations, and an evolution in its own right. The philosophical framework of dialectical materialism arose initially out of Marx's study of Hegel, was taken in new directions by angles, updated and revised by figures like Lenin and Mao, and handed down to us today. Without getting into the nuances and complexities of these differing interpretations, which would take us too far afield, let me just focus on the basics of dialectics. A dialectical approach to the world is one that apprehends all phenomena as fundamentally in motion,

as inexorably interconnected and in relationship with all other phenomena, that higher levels of existence are rooted in and emerge from lower levels, that contradictions between phenomena and within phenomena propel their evolution, and that this process of evolutionary advance is governed by laws which are knowable. Frederick Engels argued that there were at least three basic laws of dialectics. 1. The Law of Unity of Opposites, which is the source of development. Two, the law of the passage of quantitative changes into qualitative changes, which is the mechanism of development. And three, the negation of the negation, which is the direction, form, and result of the development.

Now, this is admittedly quite complex and can be very confusing to people new to the subject of dialectics. To help understand a bit better, let me use an analogy to Darwinian evolution, which will help bring these concepts to life. Evolution by natural selection is a great example of dialectical materialism. First and foremost, it shows that all life on Earth is in a constant state of evolution and development. Contrary to, say, creationists who believe God made all the animals and plants as they more or less currently are and put them here on Earth, evolutionary biologists know that this is not true. In reality, life evolves and develops in profound relation to its external environment and is constantly being morphed by natural selection via its relationship to everything else in its ecosystem.

So already we can see some basic dialectics at play. Biological life is in a constant state of motion, never static. It is interconnected and literally shaped by its relationship to other life forms as well as its external, environment in general. The higher levels of life, say humans, for example, are rooted in and emerge from lower levels of life, most recently hominids, then primates, and then mammals generally. And evolution is spurred on by contradictions between an organism and its environment. Penguins losing their ability to fly, a bumblebee's ability to see ultraviolet, humans developing language, a bat's ability to echolocate, the insane speed of gazelles and cheetah

is alike. All of these are products of contradictions between the organism and its external environment. Taking the analogy even further, we can see how, for example, small quantitative changes in an organism over time, like genetic mutations and various adaptations, eventually stack up to create a qualitative change in an organism. For example, polar bears and brown bears, or what we usually call grizzly bears, share a common ancestor. And scientists believe that at some point, either by brown bears traveling to the far north or by periods of glaciation, a single species of bear got separated, some going further north, and some staying put or going south to warmer climates. The contradiction between these brown bears far up north and the brutally cold, blindingly white

environment they found themselves in generated over long periods of time the mutations and adaptations, i.e. quantitative changes, that eventually boiled over into qualitative changes, separating the single species into the two distinct species that we know today. The point here is that we can understand the jump from quantitative change, tiny mutations and adaptations over time, piling up to create a qualitative change, in this case an entirely new species of bear. The materialism part comes in via the fact that no metaphysical or supernatural cause need be referenced. Biological evolution via natural selection is a wholly materialist process. It happens in the natural world and has laws that govern it that we, through scientific

investigation, can come to know and understand. In this same way, Marx and Engels argued the evolution of human societies through time is also a material. materialist process also has laws that govern its development and through scientific investigation we can come to know those laws and understand how they work to produce the social phenomena we see today. Human society is constantly in motion, never static. All the elements of it are deeply interconnected and interact with all other elements. The current mode of production, capitalism, is a higher form of social organization than feudalism, which capitalism is rooted in and evolved out of,

and the evolution of human societies over time are propelled by contradictions inherent in them. Today, the contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat forces various forms of class conflict that can only be resolved by transcending this division altogether. Moreover, like the law of the unity of opposites tells us, the bourgeoisie cannot exist without the proletariat. They are opposites that necessities,

that necessitate one another, like night and day or up and down. Every class struggle, every attempt to build socialism in the capitalist epoch, every person who consciously embraces socialism and sets themselves the task of helping others learn and apply it, all constitute relatively small quantitative changes that eventually create ruptures and thus the possibility of quantitative change, the change from capitalism to socialism. And just as the capitalist mode of production and its social relations negated the social organization of feudalism, socialism and eventually communism seek to negate the negation, to expropriate the expropriators. But importantly, dialectical negation, in line with the idea that higher forms are rooted in lower forms,

does not annihilate the entirety of what it replaces, but brings forward the elements of the old that are still positive and viable. while shedding all those elements of the old that are exhausted, played out, and only serve to hold humanity back. So we should expect, for example, socialism to carry forward those aspects of capitalism that are still viable, while rupturing from all those aspects of it that no longer are, whatever those turn out to be for a given society at a given time in history with a given set of specific conditions. Here we can start to get a grasp on dialectical materialism and how that, that way of thinking stands in contrast to so much so-called common sense today. For example, when someone says,

capitalism is just human nature, or this is just the way things are, or God ordained these hierarchies, ergo they are just, or you are born with the gender and can never change it, or socialism has failed everywhere it's been tried, it simply doesn't work and it never will. or a billion other little platitudes and cliches used by those who are invested in the status quo.

When they say such things, they are conveying the idea that the way things are in society today are static, metaphysically ordained, or natural, and thus they are conveying an anti-dialectical way of thinking. You can see why those who think capitalism is the best system, or those who profit from society being organized this way, want us to think that capitalism is here to stay. They want us to think that we have arrived at the pinnacle of socioeconomic organization. And while we might have some tweaking to do around the edges, the basic thing is in place and is here to stay. But dialectically, we understand that capitalism as a mode of production arose out of historical conditions is in a constant state of flux in development and evolution, and like every single mode of production before it,

will also eventually be displaced and transcended, just as it displaced and transcended feudalism. To see capitalism as historically contingent and ephemeral is to grasp dialectical and historical materialism, and you can see rather easily why those invested in maintaining the system are not interested in people thinking in these terms. Just as earlier dogmatic Christians were not very excited to see people start embracing Darwin's theory of evolution via natural selection.

Both capitalists, fending off socialists, and fundamental Christians fending off Darwinian evolutionists, must reject a dialectical way of apprehending the world, or risk their relatively cozy spot in the current order. They must put their hands up and scream, stop in the face of the inexorable march of history. Okay. Now that we hopefully have an understanding of dialectical materialism, within the Marxist tradition, the question arises, where does Buddhism fit in here? Well, I would argue that core concepts within Buddhism are profoundly dialectical, and that

Buddhist philosophy applies a more or less dialectical framework around its entire worldview. The core concepts I want to explore through this lens are the following. No self, otherwise known as emptiness, and dependent origination. To begin, I first want to make clear that both Buddhism and Marxism are process philosophies, meaning they apprehend all phenomena as processes instead of things or objects. Capitalism is an ever-evolving process, as is socialism. The natural world is a process. The cosmos itself is a process.

You and I are processes. In both traditions, nothing is static and change is the only constant. This leads to the first concept of Buddhism, no self or anata. When people first get into Buddhism and come across this concept, especially those of us in the West where ego is everything, it can seem weird, alien, even downright scary. But fundamentally, the Buddhist concept of no self or emptiness means simply that nothing, including us, has a permanent essence. There is no unchanging, abiding self at the center of our subjective experience. experience. This is quite a radical claim because the feeling of an unchanging self or soul is deeply ingrained within people, especially those of us in the West where no such philosophical

analog to no self really exists. But right now, as I speak, I am willing to bet that you feel as if there is a self inside you. Sure, over your life you have changed. Seven-year-old you is different mentally, emotionally, and physically than the you sitting and listening to this right now. No one would deny that. But when I ask you, what about you has not changed since age seven, what would you say? Well, we feel as if there is a thread running through all our experiences and all the changes in our lives, and this is the me looking out from behind my eyes. Sure, what I see in the mirror changes all the time. My opinions change. My interest change, my clothes and car and job change.

But we really feel as if there is something within us that was looking out of the eyes of our seven-year-old selves, out of our 15-year-old selves, and is still looking out of the eyes of our current selves. This is an illusion. The relentlessness of change in the cosmos spares nothing, including you and I. Moreover, we talk to ourselves in our heads all day long, constantly commenting to ourselves, blabbering on about this or that, thinking about something in the past, worrying about something in the future. If you had to go sit in your car right now, totally alone, in silence, what would your mind do? Well, it would start talking to itself.

In fact, if I stacked a million dollars on this podium and told you that if you can sit in silence and just not think a thought or talk to yourself in your own head for 60 consecutive seconds, you can have this million dollars. I can almost guarantee none of you could do it. The mind is incessant. The mind is like a monkey swinging from tree to tree, thought to thought, babbling to itself. And it's this incessant inner dialogue that we mistake for a separate self. the sense of a real permanent self inside your skull looking out of your eyes is an illusion it is the product of incessant inner dialogue of nonstop mental chatter every time you think without knowing you are thinking meaning you're identified with it every time you talk to yourself in your own head without being fully aware that that's what you're doing you are reifying the illusion of self because the illusion of self is literally generated by thinking without knowing you are thinking.

Add on top of this psychological fact, probably a product of evolution and our capacity for language, various cultural ideas, such as the eternal soul from Christianity and the Cartesian dualism between mind and body from Western philosophy, and we all fall prey to the illusion of separateness. The illusion that deep down, behind our eyes and between our ears is a little, unchanging, permanent self or soul. We say we have a body, not that we are our bodies. That too is a product of having the illusion of a little homunculus behind the control panel in our brains, using the vehicle of the body to move itself around space, but fundamentally separate from it. This trope actually shows up time and time again in our pop culture, in our

movies, and in our TV shows. I think of the creature in men in black. I think of the creature in men in Black who was an alien and when you open up his face there's a smaller alien sitting at the control panel of his brain. This is perfect Cartesian dualism. And this little fragile separate self feels monstrously insecure in this world of change and decay and death. The ego, our sense of a separate self, strives to prop up all manner of defense mechanisms to protect itself, to make itself feel safe. It clings to pleasures. It wants to run from pain. It worries about the future. It fixates on the past. It can't fathom its own annihilation at death. This illusion of a permanent self is at the root of every existential crisis. For some, this sense of a separate self

is absolutely torturous. For most of us, though, it manifests as a perpetual feeling of not being complete, of not being quite fulfilled, of never quite arriving. In short, this illusion makes us suffer. So Buddhism not only tells us, but shows us how to see for ourselves that this sense of a separate abiding self-athing self-athing, at the center of our experience is an illusion, a product of incessant self-talk, and when we build the capacity through meditation to become aware of it, to see how it manifests, and to see all the ways in which this little voice, voice in our heads makes us suffer when we can place our attention on the breath and keep it there when the mind calms down and gets real quiet we can see through the illusion and when we see through

it again and again and again eventually it gives up the game it stops being our master and takes its rightful place as our servant we can pick it up when it's practical to do so and we can set it down when it's not needed. This ability alone alleviates massive amounts of internal suffering lets us see with extreme clarity the mechanisms of the mind and how they work and no longer burdens us with the feeling of fundamentally being separate from everything else. We begin to see with astounding beauty and depth how there is no me inside here looking out at the world over there, but there is just the world. And the barrier between subject and object falls away, at least for a time, revealing the profound interconnectedness and non-duality

of everything in the cosmos. You feel as if you are no longer placed into the world only to one day be taken out of it, but rather that you are the world and the world is you and there is nothing to be born and there is nothing that dies. Liberating oneself from this illusion is a core feature of enlightenment in the Buddhist tradition, and it radically reorientes your entire moment-to-moment experience of your own existence in a profoundly beneficial and healing way. But emptiness is not just about the cell for ego. It's the claim that nothing in the universe has any abiding essence. Everything is flux. Everything is a cascade of relentless change. Nothing is permanent. Nothing is a static thing or object. We are all

just temporary whirlwinds of atoms coming together for a time as this process I call me and then dissolving away, coming together with different atoms to form another temporary process and on and on and on. To cling to the idea of a stable, permanent me, in this context, is to suffer enormously. The atoms in our bodies were forged inside stars, have been at the bottom of the ocean, passed through dinosaurs, and have come together here and now to form us. all of the cosmos based on the latest science can be traced back to an infinitely small and dense single point of origin meaning we all literally are one with everything in the universe and the big bang expelled everything outward into space and time to dance and play and swirl taking on infinite forms science in some respect is just catching up with ideas that buddhist put forward two millennia before the invention of the

scientific method itself. It's quite astounding when you sit back and think about it. In any case, this concept of no-self or emptiness in Buddhism not only fits perfectly with phenomena as processes, but with dialectics itself. Everything is in flux. Everything is intimately interconnected with everything around it. There are no things and no one who stands outside the flux. Nothing is permanent or fixed. Everything is in a constant state of development and transformation, and nothing supernatural or metaphysical need be advanced to explain material reality. On this last point, there are certainly forms of Buddhism and many Buddhists who do not

subscribe to materialism, and there can be dialectical philosophies that are neither ontologically materialist, as in Marxism, or idealist as in Hegelianism, as well as ones that remain agnostic or neutral with regards to what is primary, known. in philosophy as monism. But none of this subtracts from the idea that the concept of emptiness and no self is perfectly in line with a dialectical apprehension of the world and that one need not resort to non-materialist explanations of this reality, though some may choose to do so. Now let's move on to the Buddhist concept of dependent origination or dependent arising. In simple terms, this means that everything in the cosmos is double.

dependent on other things for their existence. The late Vietnamese Zen Buddhist, Thich Nhat Han, was great at giving examples of this. Let's take his example of the flower. When you hold a flower in your hand, you have a concept for it and a word that sits in for the thing you're holding. We understand it at first as a static object. But dig a little deeper, and we can see its interconnectedness with the entire universe. Try to imagine that flower without the soil from which it sprang. without this sun which helped it grow and allows you to see it with your eyes,

or without the rain which watered and nourished it. Another easy example would be something like a peach. When you bite into a peach, there's a sense in which you are biting into the whole world, for innumerable conditions and factors had to come together to produce this fruit, as well as the sensation you get when biting into it. We can zoom out a bit and use ourselves as examples. The iron in our blood came from exploding star, billions of years ago. The water in our blood used to be one with the ocean. The breath we breathe

is utterly dependent on plants and trees across the globe. In a real sense, plant life is as essential for our own existence as our lungs are. The sun is as essential for our own existence as our own beating hearts are. The moon stabilizes Earth's orbit, making it habitable for relatively advanced creatures such as ourselves. Without it, there would be. know us. In this way, we are profoundly, deeply dependent on everything else around us and everything else in the cosmos for our own existence. Now, we can also apply this idea to politics. The billionaire is not, as we are often told, a rugged individualist who, through grit and hard work, built his empire and is a self-made man. Rather, he is utterly dependent on scores of working and poor people

to generate even a single fucking dollar. Put a billionaire on a deserted island, and he is nothing. Everything we value from schools to hospitals to roads to air conditioning are all the products of countless people working over huge swaths of time stretching back generations. All are dependent upon a variety of factors and conditions coming together to create them. All wealth in the world is the product of centuries of human toil,

of which all of our ancestors contributed. Yet today, all of that wealth is stolen and hoarded by a tiny amount of people who claim it's rightfully theirs and not ours. The entire capitalist paradigm and the hyper-individualism that it necessitates is built on the rejection of the idea of dependent origination. It is built on a delusion. Similar arguments of this type could be made for other core concepts within Buddhism. including impermanence, non-duality, and many more. But here we can see how an idea that is central to Buddhism is intrinsically dialectical and can usefully be applied to socioeconomics and politics

in a way that directly undermines instead of bolsters the capitalist mode of production and its ideological superstructure. On the other hand, the core orientation of socialism and communism is perfectly in line with the concept of dependent origination. because we understand that everything we have is the product of countless people's labor, as well as the product of our relationship with the natural world. We understand how cooperation is essential, how solidarity with others can massively benefit ourselves,

and how we are ultimately dependent on one another. There is no me in a vacuum, and there is no you in a void. We are products of the human species, we are products of planet Earth, and we are products of the entire, fabric of the cosmos itself. We are literally, and I mean this literally, the cosmos becoming conscious. We, like all sentient beings across the universe, are literally the entire cosmos waking up here and now in this form from this standpoint. We understand the deep, underlying

interconnectedness of human civilization and of the world in which we live, and our politics, at its best honors that interconnectedness and centers it as essential. I hope thus far I have made it quite clear why this dialectical way of approaching and apprehending the world is not only correct, but a real threat to the status quo, to the ruling elite and their ideology, and to the capitalist mode of production itself. This is why Marxism, dialectical materialism, and ideas like no self and dependent origination, must remain fringe and must be undermined. We are simply not taught to think this way, and for rather obvious reasons.

One more area of philosophical overlap I want to touch on before moving forward is the concept of the three poisons in Buddhism. These three poisons are greed, ill will, and delusion. When they are present in the mind, and when one is identified with them, they wreak havoc on an individual psyche, bolster the ego delusion, and create suffering for all involved. And while Buddhism talks about this almost exclusively in terms of the individual mind, I think it's quite natural to argue that if most people are susceptible to these three poisons,

they can be instantiated not just at the individual psychological level, but also on the collective sociopolitical level. And it is my argument that capitalism in many ways institutionalizes these three poisons, attempts to naturalize them, and then exacerbates their intensity on the individual and collective levels. What, for example, is capitalist profiteering and exploitation, if not unbridled greed, presented as natural and good? What is imperialism, colonialism, all manifestations of capitalism, if not institutionalized and structural ill will? Connected, of course, with the inherent greed of capitalism and its incentive structures.

What is capitalist ideology, if not hegemonic delusion? On every level, it seems that these three poisons which Buddhism identifies are taken to their structural and institutional extremes within capitalism. Moreover, if Buddhism is correct in arguing these three poisons are prevalent in the unenlightened human mind, it stands to reason that putting millions of humans together might take these individual psychological traits and turn them into collect. collective institutions. And this is an insight derived precisely from investigating the ways in which Buddhism and Marxism dovetail and overlap. Buddhism, by illuminating certain truths about how the human mind works, can offer Marxism useful concepts that can be applied to society as a whole. Marxism is, after all, not focused on individuals and their minds, and there are things to learn about

individual psychology and the machinations of the human mind that are illuminating and helpful to a broader social analysis and critique. In this way, these two traditions, focusing on opposite ends of the individual verse collective spectrum, can be brought together to deepen already existing insights, as well as generate new ones. What I am doing here is hardly exhaustive on this front. Rather, it's more akin to a first pass in the hopes that Buddhists might take an interest in Marxism, that Marxists might take an interest in Buddhism, and that more connections and useful synergies might be discovered and utilized to work toward the shared goal of ending suffering and pursuing liberation.

Part 3. What can Marxism and Buddhism offer one another? Now that we have discussed what Marxism and Buddhism are, as well as some of the ways in which their basic dialectical approach to the world overlaps and can even deepen one another, I want to touch on some concrete things that each tradition might be able to offer the other one. To keep it simple and concise, I believe that what Buddhism can offer Marxism is an inroad to a form of dialectical analysis of the individual, their mind, and its mechanisms. Marxism is not fundamentally concerned with these things, but as good dialecticians, we understand there is a profoundly important dialectical relationship between inner and outer, between the individual and the

collective, between psychology and ideology. As such, it can only benefit us Marxists to take that side of the coin as it were seriously, particularly in the context of political education, organizing, meeting people where they are, and importantly, constructing healthy, non-toxic activist spaces and organizations. And this is important because if any of you have had the experience of visiting Marxist internet subcultures or even many organizations, I am sure you've noticed there tends to be a lot of ego. Marxists tend to be intellectual types, and without a sort of psychological ballast and ethical structure offered by things like Buddhism, those egos swell to sometimes insane proportions. People want to be right more than they want to be effective.

Entire organizations doing good work will split up and disintegrate based on members and ability to navigate interpersonal conflict or because of the fixation on minor disagreements that are irrelevant to the current struggle. Buddhism offers an ethical structure and behavioral guidelines that Marxism often lacks, and they can be applied in a secular way if needed. For example, while some of the eight principles and the eightfold path are fundamentally about Buddhist meditation, right mindfulness, and right concentration, for example, the vast majority of them can be applied to anyone from any religious, spiritual, or cultural background, which is different from something like the Ten Commandments in Christianity, for example.

Right intention, right speech, right action, right everything. effort, right view, and right livelihood are all fully applicable within the context of a socialist organization or cadre. They are ready-made ethical guidelines with millennia of history that not only help create a healthier organizational culture and healthier individuals, but are also fundamental to the sort of awakening process within Buddhism that, while not necessary for Marxists, could only be a positive thing if pursued. In summary, Buddhism offers up an analysis of individual psychology, a universally applicable ethical structure, a systematic way of addressing egoism in ourselves and our comrades, and can help us relate better to ourselves, as well as others

in our community and beyond. On the flip side, we must ask, what can Marxism offer Buddhism? Well, I would argue that it would be something like the systematic, scientific analysis of social, economic, and political phenomena, which is the outward, collective application of the systematic and scientifically rigorous analysis of psychological and emotional phenomena that Buddhism already excels at. In addition, Marxism offers a political methodology for overcoming institutionalized and structural forms of the three poisons.

Buddhists will often talk about healing the world by healing oneself, and while I find that to be useful and even true, I don't find it to be sufficient. We do not have the time to sit around and wait for enough people to get into Buddhism and become enlightened to make the sort of collective change that is so desperately needed. With climate change, the risk of nuclear war, the rapid advancement of society-shaking technologies that under capitalism become mechanisms of further destitution and unemployment and misery, the many ongoing imperialist conflicts, the rise of neo-fascist authoritarianism around the world, and many more crises piling up. up every single day, we simply do not have the luxury of waiting for everyone to do the necessary individual work required to reform human civilization. That can only be done through international, organized, and revolutionary political movements with a totally different vision for the world. While socially engaged forms of Buddhism do exist, they often

default to the liberal center and to weak forms of reformism. Defaulting to lukewarm liberal activism does literally nothing to move the needle in the direction it needs to be moved. And since it is liberal, it seeks not to create a different world, but to reify and replicate the very ideological hegemony that keeps things as they are, often without knowing that that's what they're doing. And this is because liberalism is the dominant ideology of capitalism itself. They go hand in hand. If Buddhists are serious about alleviating suffering, then they have to take politics.

seriously. And if Marxists are serious about becoming the sort of people that are capable of creating a truly new and better world, they need to take the inner work that traditions like Buddhism offer seriously. Conclusion. The Bodhisattva revolutionary. Today I have argued that Marxism can benefit from a sincere engagement with Buddhism, and Buddhism in turn can benefit from a sincere engagement with Marxism. I hope I have outlined effectively the primary goals of each tradition, the ways in which their philosophical orientations share a deeply dialectical lens, and the ways in which each tradition could benefit and possibly deepen the other. To end, I want to leave you with an image, an archetype, if you will, that synthesizes everything I've said here today into a template that

each of us, insofar as we are more or less convinced of what I've been arguing for, can adopt and strive to fulfill. This archetype is what I call the Bodhisattva Revolutionary. We all know what a revolutionary is. It is someone committed to confronting the injustice and inequality and suffering that are ubiquitous in class society and working to build a better, more just, a more equitable egalitarian world. The revolutionary is selfless, dedicated to the people, and shaking with indignation at every injustice. Figures like Che Guevara, Thomas Sankara, Rosa Luxembourg and many others jumped to mind. All of these people mentioned were also willing to pay the ultimate price for their vision of a better world.

All three of them were brutally murdered by agents of the status quo, of capitalism, of fascism, and of imperialism. Their images are seared into our brains, and we strive to contribute even a fraction of what they did to the project of building a better world. now we must combine that with the image of the Bodhisattva that figure within Mahayana Buddhism who in one telling is an already enlightened being who out of pure loving compassion for other sentient beings remains in the cycle of samsara and foregoes nirvana simply in order to save others that version might be too ideal for many of us who are anything but enlightened

and of course I count myself among the unenlightened The other version of the Bodhisattva is a little more realistic. It is someone who is on the path towards Buddhahood and who commits themselves to dedicating their entire life and meditative practice and their whole being to the alleviation of suffering in others. The Bodhisattva is selfless in an even deeper sense than the revolutionary because she seeks to actively dismantle the illusion of a separate self and uses the insight gained from that endeavor to better understand and thus help others.

sentient beings. Bodhisattvas set for themselves the impossible task, the consciously impossible task of ending all suffering and helping all beings to awaken. They vow not to enter nirvana themselves until all beings can enter it together, hand in hand. That's real solidarity. By combining these archetypes, one Marxist and one Buddhist, we can create for ourselves a well-balanced ideal to strive for. Instead of dedicating our lives to careerism, the accumulation of wealth, and the pursuit of high status within the capitalist framework, as we are trained to do, we reject all of that and dedicate our lives instead to alleviating the suffering of other beings, confronting courageously the forces of oppression and hate and greed, and toppling structures

of domination and suffering in order to build an egalitarian civilization, rooted in interconnectedness, justice, truth, beauty, and solidarity. A world where no one sleeps in the gutters. A world where no one goes without health care or food. A world in which no one goes without an education. And a world where no one suffers in totally avoidable and unnecessary ways so that others may live lives of extreme opulence. Let us all strive to embody within ourselves,

The Bodhisattva Revolutionary Ideal. Thank you for listening. RevLeft Radio is 100% listener funded. If you like what we do here, you can support us at patreon.com forward slash RevLeft Radio

or make a one-time donation at buymea coffee.com forward slash rev left radio links will be in the show notes